1. Technical Field
The embodiments described herein are related to social discovery, and more particularly to a service allowing users to discover, engage, and interact with any entity within their proximity, including other users and businesses.
2. Related Art
Conventional location-based social discovery services allow users to locate certain nearby places and acquaintances. In the case of ‘singles’ applications, users are able to view nearby singles with matching profiles. However, in order to establish communication between two individuals, conventional social discovery services all require either an existing relationship (e.g., a mutual friendship) or a match (e.g., two singles with complementary interests). These types of restrictions drastically limit the potential for users of conventional social discovery service to encounter new people and places.
Conventional social discovery services also rely on technologies such as global positioning system (GPS) and WiFi-based positioning to determine the location of various users relative to surrounding places and people of interest. However, GPS generally does not operate indoors while WiFi-based positioning is not precise enough. Moreover, both GPS and WiFi-based positioning require significant backend resources. Central servers must expend tremendous amounts the computational power in order to track and calculate the relative position of every individual using the service. Consequently, conventional location-based social discovery services struggle to efficiently and economically accommodate large numbers of active users.